Region

Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award and members of the World Future Council have called for a global phase-out of atomic power reactors as well as the abolition of nuclear weapons. In a joint statement, fifty laureates said the Japanese nuclear disaster had raised global awareness of the extreme dangers that can result from nuclear power generation.

With its US affiliate, Physicians for Global Survival called for a moratorium on new nuclear reactors in Canada and a suspension of operations at the nuclear reactors on fault lines. PGS cited the medical risks associated with radiation exposure and stressed that radioactive emissions from nuclear power plants expose entire populations and are the “gifts that keep on giving”.

Responding to the comment by Japanese nuclear safety agency spokesman Mr. Nishiyama that Greenpeace’s radiation data from Iidate village, 40km from the crisis-ridden Fukushima nuclear plant “could not be considered reliable” (1), and that most people have already voluntarily left the town of Iitate, Greenpeace radiation expert Jan van der Putte said:

In his early thirties, Kamakura-born Koichi Nakatani will never forget the day he stepped outside his isolated Hokkaido home and began as usual to breathe in the beautiful day when the thought struck him…. ‘oh, radiation is in the air, I shouldn’t really breathe deeply; oh my open sea and sky, will I ever be able to breathe deeply here again?’

The unceasing waves of protests and uprisings against Arab regimes have given rise to a tantalizing question: Why have the winds of change sweeping the Arab world not had any effect on the Chinese people and aroused them against their government?
There are many reasons for the absence of tumult in China. These reasons become clear if one takes an unbiased view of the country.

Countries which continue to use the death penalty are being left increasingly isolated following a decade of progress towards abolition, Amnesty International has said today in its new report Death Sentences and Executions in 2010.
A total of 31 countries abolished the death penalty in law or in practice during the last 10 years.

Since 2008 the vast majority of the Western population dream about saying “no” to the banks, but no one has dared to do so. No one except the Icelanders, who have carried out a peaceful revolution that has managed not only to overthrow a government and draft a new constitution, but also seeks to jail those responsible for the country’s economic debacle.

The world team of the humanist organism Convergence of Cultures denounces the growing violence that the non-resolved post-electoral crisis is causing in Ivory Coast, and demands a non-violent solution that lets the country overcome the social fracture. There have been many victims of indiscriminate violence, among them the humanists Lacina, Drissa and Moumouni.

When they were just a few years old, they marched with Gandhi against the laws of an oppressing regime. This weekend a few of the veterans from the 1930 salt march took to the streets again. They were protesting against the democratic government for which they had once fought. The latest nationwide battle is against corruption.

Reverberations from Fukushima crisis are being felt around the world, as plans to build new nuclear power plants are being challenged. The safety of existing plants is being questioned. The cost of nuclear power is projected to rise, and the bottom has fallen out of the uranium market. Here’s a quick glimpse of what’s happening.